Cincinnati-Xavier Basketball Riot

The riot that broke out at the end of the Cincinnati-Xavier basketball game should be reason enough for the NCAA to finally crackdown on trash talking in all sports. Civility and sportsmanship has long since been abandoned in not only in American sports but in our society as a whole. Xavier All-American guard Tu Holloway was quoted as stating after the game that “We’ve got a whole bunch of gangsters in our locker room.” Is this really the image the NCAA and our universities want to project to the youth of America?

This type of boorish attitude has probably been around for a very long time, as I am old enough to remember watching the beating and hospitalization of several Ohio State basketball players by the Minnesota Golden Gophers on February 7, 1972, but it was glorified by the Miami Hurricanes football team during the 1980s, when that program relished its image as gangsters and hooligans when it wore combat fatigues on the way to the 1987 Fiesta Bowl.

Sad as this brawl was, this type of brutal behavior is probably more reflective of the violent culture of America. Be it this nation’s warmongering military-industrial complex down to all those shoot ‘em in the head to receive bonus points video games (which were first developed by the military to train its soldiers for combat) parents give their children for Christmas, America has become a very sadistic nation. The brawl in Cincinnati is just the latest example of a society gone wild.